Remembering victims of 9/11

Today, we remember those going about their business 12 years ago on Sept. 11, at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and aboard Flight 93 when the fiendish plot against our friends in America commenced with a cold, calculated ferocity reminiscent of Japan’s unprovoked attack at Pearl Harbor.

Our Canadian forces deployed to the Afghanistan theatre in aftermath of 9/11, have done us proud, in the quest to destroy Al Qaeda’s loathsome network. Al Qaeda’s tactics have led to countless civilian casualties for which they, and they alone, are liable.

Time has not abated the threat from these cold-blooded, depraved psychopaths as we have seen subsequently with the hundreds massacred in 2002 at Paddy’s Pub and the Sari Nightclub in Bali, in 2004 at the heartless and cowardly Besland School siege in Russia, in 2005 with the multiple London Transit bombings, and most recently in 2008 at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, India.

U.S. President Barack Obama has relentlessly droned terrorist infrastructure and we thank America’s commander-in-chief for his bold, unilateral “Operation Geronimo” that executed that hideous public enemy number one, Osama bin Laden, once and for all in the heart of Pakistan.

As for “Ground Zero” in New York City, the gleaming new skyscrapers captivate onlookers from Ellis Island enjoying the “prevailing winds of liberty” off the Hudson River along with thousands of tourists delighting in the city that never sleeps.

On this anniversary, we are reminded how vital it is to have a potent Department of National Defence safeguarding our liberties that we all too often take for granted. Paramount to our sovereignty is a modernization of our military’s ground, sea, and air assets, including the acquisition of up to a dozen British Astute Class or Frencn Barracuda Submarines (wake-up MP Rob Nicholson and Prime Minister StephenHarper, enough hollow talk), which can take a half decade to assemble, to patrol “the largest coastline in the world.”

Let us provide the military the overdue resources to stand on guard against terrorists, drug-smuggling swine, and pillagers of our fishery and offshore oil resources who would dare to test Canada’s territorial integrity.